


Mary Morstan's Eyes

by mystery_deer



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, John is bisexual as hell but this fic is about homosexuality, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Period-Typical Sexism, background Johnlock, just a line or two nothing too horrible, sherlock isn't there very much this is chiefly about john and mary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-03 17:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20456708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystery_deer/pseuds/mystery_deer
Summary: John thinks about his marriage to Mary Morstan





	Mary Morstan's Eyes

The first time John saw his wife-to-be, the lovely miss Mary Morstan, he thought to himself that she was neither exceptionally beautiful or hideously ugly. However when their eyes met he felt drawn to her as if by the divine and so he said hello and she responded in turn. 

That was how a great deal of their marriage went. John thinking nothing much and then all at once being overcome by some strong and strange emotion he thought was more suited to a wife, but Mary was not prone to such outbursts of feeling least of all for him.

Mary had grown up in a sense orphaned. After her mother’s death her father had shipped her off to boarding school the moment she was old enough to be educated. She wore this sadness about her like a blanket and in their years of marriage he had only seen her without it a short few times. At first he thought this was due to the recent death of her father but came to view it as part of her, less of a blanket and more of an inherited trait she could help no more than her eyes being blue.

“My father had no use for a daughter, least of all an uneducated one.” She’d told him over perfectly prepared coffee one morning. He would stay over at her home many nights in those early-love days but nothing untoward ever happened and it never crossed his mind to urge anything untoward along. Mary never spoke of it and so neither did he. Even after marriage the subject of sex made the couple blush fiercely and lapse into silence as if being introduced to the matter for the first time.

“He visited often of course, but he was not a tender man and he had no one tender to assist in the task of raising me. So in lieu of family I was raised in the breasts of nuns and girls my age at school until I was ready to go out into the world.”

Mary looked out the window and to John she looked every bit like a bird in a cage. The light caught her hair and stuck to it, giving her dull yellowish locks a golden hue that took his breath away. In these moments he thought she possessed the beauty of a goddess and forgot how he could ever think her features ordinary.

“What was it like in boarding school?” He asked one day. It was the night after they’d been married. He was sitting in an armchair and she was washing the sheets, going over the same spot where the mark went from a vivid deep red to a faded pink to white again over time.

“It was heaven and hell.” She replied. “Heaven and hell.” And the conversation ended there that day. 

A week later as they were lying in bed, bodies intertwined she spoke about a girl she knew there. 

“Her name was Lydia and she was the loveliest, liveliest girl I’d ever known. She had long tendrils of hair nearly down to her waist that she’d tie up in ribbons with colors so rich I could nearly taste them.” As she spoke her voice trembled with emotion so much that John worried for an instant that she was on the verge of tears.

“We were the best of friends, close as two girls could be. We would often leave classes early complaining of an ache or a similar ailment where the only treatment could be bedrest, and then sneak out together past the trees and shrubbery that surrounded our academy. We felt completely alone out there, out from the sight of anyone.”

“What did you do there?” John asked, and he watched as his wife morphed back into the woman he knew. Her eyes were still blue but they lost some of their color and seemed to sink back into her head. He felt as if he'd shattered something and guilt pooled in his stomach, slow and weighty.

“Girlish things, childish.” She said, and the measured carefreeness with which she spoke made him drop the matter entirely. He’d seen it before.

He’d seen it in his fellow army men who sent their ‘dear boy’ letters and when questioned laughed longer and harder than anybody at the teasing, good or ill natured. He’d seen it in some of the men and women who came to Sherlock’s office pleading they find a ‘cousin’ or ‘uncle’ of theirs.

He’d seen it in himself as a boy, when he was still in school and one of his friends noticed him watching a football player a little too closely.   
Seen it when a kiss had to laughed off, pushed away, ridiculed to death for fear that it bloom into anything more. 

Looking into Mary’s eyes was so much like looking into his own at times that he couldn’t bear to do it, leaving to visit Sherlock or spending nights in his clinic’s office.

She would always be waiting for him when he was home but the house never looked any different from when he left.

One day when he came home he saw that there were two china cups in the sink, both marked by lipstick and the next time he came home he saw Mary sitting in the living room and talking in quiet tones with another woman he’d never seen before.

“Hello, I’m John.” He said, feeling every bit the intruder even as the woman shook his hand. Her grip was delicate and her voice was sweet as anything, lilting and soft. His Mary Morstan greeted him but couldn’t look him in the eyes, he wondered if she felt the same pain he did when she looked at them.

The woman’s name slipped from him the moment he took it and he never asked for it again. 

It was raining and he knew it was a Sunday because there were passersby in Sunday best attire rushing to and fro and the sound of bells was a distant but constant sound. Being raised religious also gave you, he thought, an ingrained knowledge of when it was Sunday. 

When he opened the door to his home he found Mary gone, something that immediately struck him as odd. He hadn’t known her to leave the house without alerting him and if she did leave she was usually back home, looking out the window before he returned. By doing this she’d become a kind of ghostly presence, haunting the halls of their home. 

On the table he came across a note written in her beautiful, romantic script. She’d written only one letter to him. It was when she became ill and had had to stay in the hospital for a month. She wrote to him only a few sentences, about the food and the light above her bed that glared down at her with a harshness that plagued her and made it so her sleep was fitful and unpleasant. 

In this new letter so she’d written about a nurse she’d met there. The woman with the delicate handshake and slight smile.

“I think you would like her quite a bit. She’s kind as you and she reminds me of you in other ways as well. Her bedside manner and how she wears her heart on her sleeve no matter how many times I warn against it. 

She had a home in the country. Her father’s father built it and it’s surrounded by trees and ferns and there’s a lake that can be seen from the master bedroom’s window, shining in the moonlight and glimmering in the sun. It’s empty there, her father died and her father’s father died and now she is an orphan, same as me. 

I am going to visit her there, I believe.”

She’d ended the letter with nothing but blankness where her signature should go and John could imagine her setting down her pen and looking out the window of their home for the last time. The window that looked out onto the burly and gray streets of London with plumes of smoke and days soaked in fog. Horses going back and forth, people bustling by, rain hitting the pavement angrily. He imagined her looking out the window and thinking of that nurse, thinking of her slender barely-grasping hands that so tenderly cooled her fevered head and he felt a swell of emotion he couldn’t name. 

He never saw or heard from her again, that Miss Mary Morstan but some nights when he was sitting at the table he looked out the window and thought that on the distant horizon he could see her. She whirled and spun and danced as she ran, hiking her light summer skirts up so as not to fall as her hair whipped about in the sun. He saw her running through endless fields of green, eyes perfectly mimicking the blue of the clear country sky and he saw her nurse running with her. At her side, wearing matching grins nearly inappropriately carefree for their age. 

He thought he could hear her laughter, that pure unadulterated joy he’d heard once when he’d arrived home early and caught her reading a scrap of paper he’d never asked about. That laughter that warmed his chest and spurred him on to join in.

He told Sherlock that she’d died when he next asked about her.

"You have quite the cheerful disposition for a man who's found himself widowed."  
"Do I?" He'd asked, taking a long sip from the cup of tea that Sherlock had prepared for him. It always had too little sugar for him but he always drank it eagerly without adding any more, the knowledge that his dear friend had made it enough to make the effort worth it. 

"I've been well acquainted with death during my time in the war and her sickness wasn't a surprise to me. Perhaps I don't show signs of my sadness because I've been grieving the loss of her for what seems like years to me." He posited. 

Sherlock took this and didn't elaborate on it further, growing bored and uncomfortable with matters of the heart as he often did whenever John began to speak of them. As Sherlock began talking about the latest show he'd gone to see, John sat back in his chair, placing his empty cup on the table and listened to him. In the moment he thought nothing but later he'd look upon the moment, at the warmth and ease and comfort of it, and feel his chest tighten and eyes burn as an unfamiliar feeling washed over him. 

He wondered what it could be.


End file.
